Sunday, June 30, 2013

The
week before demonstrations planned for June 30 demanding that Egyptian
President Muhammad Morsi step down and new elections be held has been one of
unsettling violence and an increasing sense of foreboding that the political
situation is spinning out of control.It is clearer to many what Egypt is not (Turkey, Brazil, Tunisia,
Eastern Europe) than what it is. With millions of Egyptians taking to the streets on June 30, 2013 to demand the Morsi step down Egypt has entered into a new period of revolutionary upheaval.

The
events of the last two weeks have, moreover, provided some answers to some
long-standing questions of the past two years.The protests that ousted former President Mubarak were not
solely (or even primarily) the work of Islamists hiding under a thin veneer of
westernized secular youth; the Muslim Brothers, despite a wide membership and
impressive internal capacity for mobilization far from the uncontested
representative of a heterogeneous but predominantly Muslim society; fractured
and occasionally clueless as the opposition may be, millions of Egyptians, in
the large cities and provincial towns, will nevertheless mobilize in the
streets along with it.Oh, and, it
still makes sense to call events in Egypt a revolution even if they diverge
significantly from the canonical (and largely academic) definitions.Lightly amended for our modern taste,
Lenin writing in 1913 declared that a revolutionary crisis occurred when the
elite could no longer rule in the old way and the masses no longer desired to
live in the old way.

Unfortunately a two and a half hour
speech by the president on June 26 outlining his analysis of the situation and
the accomplishments of his first year in office only worsened the polarization.
Morsi criticized publishers,
political figures and at least one judge by name as well as asserting that the
opposition was, in some measure, treasonous.Despite a claim that “the media” broadcast rumors, adversity
and hate speech, he was not, he said, “accusing everyone in the media.”Many Egyptians may, however, have heard
a soft echo of the old repressive Nasserist slogan: no voice higher than the
voice of the revolution.Morsi indulged
in other populist rhetoric, claiming (for example) that lines and shortages at
gas stations were due to petty corruption.As with any good elected politician he also blamed most
problems on the old regime while occasionally taking credit for its successes,
notably the imposition of a minimum wage of 600 Egyptian pounds which has been
in effect since January 2012 (six months before his election).Some parts, such as the idea that 32 families control the
Egyptian economy, seem to have no particular relationship to reality.At least one other part was plaintively
all too correct: Morsi was right to voice his distress at the “icy relations”
between the people and the government but his analysis that it was all due to
the fear of the Islamic boogieman must have sounded hollow to large numbers of
people who consider themselves Muslims and whose educations owe nothing to the
boogieman of Orientalism.

The speech itself may have only
deepened an already existing credibility gap between the government and the
bulk of the population.Several
times in the last weeks, for example, ministers claimed that there was no
shortage of gasoline; or that diesel (called “solar” in Egypt) was available;
and that electricity outages would soon cease.Such routine assurances flew in the face of the daily
experience of millions of people.The
MB has frequently betrayed its promises to its political allies and rivals, but
these are not really the stuff of mass protest.The ten million people who returned 235 members of the MB in
the 2011 parliamentary elections were not disturbed that it had earlier
promised to contest fewer seats.It was clear by the time of the presidential run-off a year ago that the
country was deeply divided but there is no reason to believe the vote for
former General and Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq was driven by concern that the
MB had promised months earlier not to field a candidate for president.These are legitimate concerns for
activists but they have not brought millions of people out into the streets.

If
it was not clear enough from the presidential run-off that the country has
profoundly divided, it has been far more so since last November when President
Morsi issued a constitutional declaration that sought to shield his
administration from challenge in the courts.That was when the first massive demonstrations against Morsi
and the earliest slogans calling for an end to what was labeled as the
“government of the Guide” (referring to the role of the Supreme Guide of the
Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Badi’) circulated.Since then Morsi himself has increasingly become
the target of the opposition. Gone are the jokes about Morsi as the spare tire.

Morsi’s
major accomplishments, being the first elected civilian president of Egypt and
the man who could claim to have gotten the Armed Forces out of political life,
have not been followed up with equally rapid changes in the economic or
political environment.To the
contrary, for those with an interest (either intellectual or practical) in
politics the last six months have been less than inspiring.Morsi’s government, led by Prime
Minister Hisham Qandil, was barely able to pass legislation enabling Islamic
bonds (sukuk) due to the opposition of the Azhar whose enhanced role the MB had
written into the new constitution.The Azhar and other,
Islamist, opponents claimed the legislation would allow strategic national assets
to become the private property of foreigners.

The government has also been
sharply attacked by a variety of figures for its recent decision to create a
special investment area in the Canal Zone which, it was alleged, would dilute sovereignty
for the benefit of foreign investors. This may have seemed an implausible
concern. This is an especially
important issue in the Canal Zone cities (Suez, Ismailiya, Port Said) that have
been centers of revolt since January 2011. It also evokes powerful fears in a country one of whose major
assets, the Suez Canal, was owned by foreigners (among which the British
government) until 1956.Educated
Egyptians of Morsi’s generation are likely to recall the novelist Gamal al-Ghitani’s
1970s fantasy , “Recollection of What Happened in Egypt”,in which foreigners threaten to buy up
all of Egypt and evict the Egyptians as a cautionary tale if not a likely
probability.

That the MB had trouble passing
legislation is surprising because it only needed a majority in the rump Shoura
Council (Upper House) where it holds nearly 45% of the seats in its own
name.There is, for now, no lower
house because it was dissolved by the Supreme Constitutional Court last year;
the new constitution specifically grandfathered the Shoura Council as the
country’s legislature until new elections are held.

More immediate domestic problems
however are rising unemployment, shortages of gasoline and diesel, electricity
outages, and continuing problems with the function of the country’s
infrastructure, including public transit and the national rail network.To some degree these are legacies
of decades of misdirected investment; to some degree they have been exacerbated
by the revolution itself; and to some degree they have been worsened by
decisions (or more frequently the absence of decisions) by the present
government.Morsi’s speech
at once recognized and tried to deflect a widespread sense of the government’s incapacity.These, however, that affect all
Egyptians every day directly and indirectly.What the government recognizes as a problem with “traffic”
translates into increased commute times that affect not only upper-middle class
people who drive their own cars but working class women forced out of paid
employment because commuting time makes it impossible to hold paid employment
and attend to family expectations.

There might be more widespread
willingness to give the government more space if it had not opened up a yawning
credibility gap.Along with the
obvious shortages of good and services, the government has produced more than
its quota of excuses and denials.Ministers have proclaimed the electricity problem solved and an end to
outages that then become more extensive although they never seem to occur in
the neighborhoods where the ministers themselves live. The government claims
there are ample supplies of gasoline, butane and diesel despite long lines and
rising prices on the black market.These were the problems President Morsi, perhaps unwisely, promised to address
if not to solve within the first hundred days of his administration.

The inability of the government to
restore public safety and the perception of rising levels of violence has also
tended to undermine the government’s credibility.There is a widespread belief that muggings, robberies, and
armed assaults are more frequent than in the past.There have been something like a dozen authenticated
lynchings over the last two years and in several instances the bodies of
supposed criminals who were beaten to death were exposed to public view on the
ground or hung from utility poles.

For the last several years as well
religious violence appears to have increased with several attacks on churches
and street battles between Christians and Muslims.Last week religious violence moved in a new direction when a
mob estimated at more than a thousand attacked a Shi’i sheikh, Hassan Shehata,
in a Cairene suburb and beat him to death along with three of his
followers.Shehata, originally an
Azhari-trained Egyptian Sunni, had worked in the neighborhood decades earlier
before his conversion and he may have had enemies as well as friends and
supporters.He evidently fell
victim to a heightened antagonism to Shi’i Islam increasingly evident in some
Salafi circles (including some members of the MB) over the decade which was
itself heightened by a specific campaign led against him over the past few
weeks.Those who led the attack
evidently spread rumors that their Shi’i fellow-citizens were engaged in
wife-swapping and ritually cursing several of the earliest followers of the
prophet Muhammad.Investigations
afterward have shown that the police were at the very least criminally
negligent as they were evidently stationed less than a hundred meters from the
site where the crowd gathered to beat the men and firebomb the house they were
in.

As has been true elsewhere over the
last several years the response of Egyptians to this terrible act of violence
was far from what the perpetrators may have expected.While there were some attempts to explain it away or defend
it there were widespread condemnations of the killings, including one from the
Azhar which has itself been engaged in opposing what it alleges is the danger
of Shi’i infiltration into Egypt.Shehata’s
murder was a singular event but its roots lie in the increased demonization of
Shi’i thought and practice that lie largely within the Salafi movement and
which have, over the past several years, engaged in attacks on Sufi shrines as
well.

The police may well have been
afraid to intervene once the crowd had gathered but their absence contributes
to a sense that Morsi (who issued a condemnation of the murders 24 hours after
they occurred) says one thing while his supporters act in a very different way.If the MB once had a credibility gap
with the outside world for saying one thing in Arabic and another in English it
now has a sharper credibility gap with sections of the Egyptian people to whom
its leaders seem to say one thing on the stage and whose followers may practice
entirely differently with a completely different rhetoric in the streets.

Morsi has not been much more
successful in international affairs than domestically.The most dramatic and most recent
problem was the decision by the Ethiopian government to build a dam on the Blue
Nile, one of the major tributaries of Egypt’s own Nile.Just as the Mubarak government was
taken by surprise when the governments of the Upper Nile basin decided to
abrogate the treaty governing present favorable division of the Nile waters (a
legacy of British rule) the Morsi government professed surprise at the decision
to build a dam.It has long been
clear that the countries of central Africa would at some point need access to
Nile water but successive Egyptian governments have ignored the problem.Faced with a public relations crisis
(since the dam itself will not be filled for year it is not an immediately
pressing issue in terms of actual water), the government allowed a public
discussion in which the ideas of invading Ethiopia, creating chaos, and other
unrealistic possibilities were floated.If members of the opposition who participated in proposing some such
proposals were embarrassed the entire affair left another sense that the
government itself is insufficiently concerned with acting on the country’s
vital interests before rather than after they have been critically affected.

After
the adoption of the new constitution in December 2012, the MB was on the brink
of consolidating its new order.The older and frankly ineffectual politicians of the opposition were in
disarray.The emergence of the
Tamarrod (revolt) petition campaign at first was a completely marginal
enterprise, its leaders not only young and unknown but largely different from
those young activists who were associated with the 2011 demonstrations.

No
doubt there will be many more descriptions and analyses of the Tamarrod
campaign but I want to focus on two aspects that I think deserve
attention.The first is that the
campaign itself emerged in the context of statements from members of the MB and
their associated Freedom and Justice party taunting the opposition for its
inability to organize.They were
not alone in this as a significant number of foreign commentators picked up the
same theme.The idea of a petition
campaign demanding that Morsi step down and early presidential elections be
held appeared at first as simply another sign of the inability of the
opposition to the MB to organize and of their equally great inability to accept
the verdict of a democratic vote that had made him president.

There
are, it seems to me, two important but distinct ways that over the last century
Egyptians have organized what analysts (especially American analysts who have
been somewhat obsessive about this) call social movements.One is an exchange model in which
political entrepreneurs provide welfare goods and receive political support in
return.This has been a staple for
how the MB and many of its daughter organizations have been built.It was also a model deployed, with less success, by Egyptian
communists in the 1940s.The other
model I can only think of as a civic mobilization model and its greatest
success in Egypt was the 1918 “tawkilat” campaign of the Wafd in which hundreds
thousands of Egyptians (among whom the illiterate) signed or sealed petitions
giving the Wafd their power of attorney to negotiate with the British.These are not peculiar to Egypt and in
the US we are familiar with the exchange model through the history of the
integration (especially) of immigrant populations into politics through the
agency of political machines and also with the mobilization model through the
civil rights movements in which millions of disenfranchised African American
won the vote in the South.

The
petition campaign turned out to be a popular way for people to express
opposition to the Morsi government and as such it served its purpose as an
organizing tool.It has provided
millions of people with the possibility of peacefully demanding an end to the
current situation both through the provision of signatures and through what has
become certainly the largest and widest set of demonstrations in absolute terms
in Egyptian history.

There
is considerable discussion among foreign commentators and Egyptians about the
responsibility that now devolves on the opposition and much less on the
responsibility that devolves on the ruling party.I want to emphasize the role of the ruling party rather than
Morsi because the mechanism that most critics of the opposition (for example
Walter Meade writing on his website and Leslie Chang writing in The New Yorker)
is that parliamentary elections now and presidential elections in three years
are the democratic solution.Thinking
back over the past four decades of the history of the western democracies
suggests that leaders are not so infrequently forced out of office by
demonstrations albeit not directly.The catalyst is usually that the demonstrations foretell a loss at an
upcoming election that the leader or his (or her) party find unacceptable.This was certainly the case with
Margaret Thatcher whose policies, after a decade in power, had become not only
increasingly unpopular but electorally dangerous.

Clearly
just as President Morsi has proven to be unwilling to separate himself from the
MB leadership, the legislative delegation of the MB/FJP in either house has so
far proven unwilling to separate itself either from him or the organization’s
leadership.They have all shown a
remarkable party discipline more similar to that of the Communists of the 20th
century than to its Social Democrats.In one sense this is a remarkable achievement but it
invariably carries the cost of electoral and political rigidity and ultimately
failure.

Yet
the question remains exactly why, if the opposition is so weak and divided and
if the MB/FJP are so committed to democracy they don’t themselves call for new
elections.Snap parliamentary
elections would have been one way to settle the dispute before now.They would have placed the opposition
(and Tamarrod) in an uncomfortable position of either accepting elections they
might lose or refusing to participate in the democratic process.And indeed until recently the MB as
well as the White House and many American commentators have argued in just such
a vein. Parliamentary elections should have been held several months ago
according to the timetable established in the new constitution but they have
not.

Of
course fear of losing elections is a very good reason to postpone them.How is it possible for the MB to
postpone the elections while at the same time casting the blame on the
opposition? The opposition, after all, has effectively no legislative power because
the MB-dominated legislature that writes the necessary laws for implementing
elections.The now somewhat tired
and almost forgotten story is that the new constitution gave the Supreme
Constitutional Court the task of prior review of the election laws and in the
process denied them subsequent review.This was to prevent the court from dissolving parliaments as it had done
both under Mubarak and in the post-revolutionary period.

The
Shoura council passed an election law which it sent to the SCC which it deemed
unconstitutional for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with electoral
procedures. The Shoura council
lightly amended the law and then the SCC took the occasion to claim that it
could engage in continuing prior review.It then rejected the new law and the Shoura council has not since
attempted another try.A party
eager for elections and relatively certain of its chances could have easily
complied with the SCC requirements (this is not the place to go into the
specifics of electoral mechanics).By not writing such a law the MB can take advantage of a different
section of the new constitution: the one that mandates that the present Shoura
council is the legislature until whenever new elections are held.For now, the MB can argue that it would
like to hold elections but the opposition is threatening to boycott and besides
is using its power, in the SCC, to block the necessary legislation.It has neatly deflected the issue away
from itself. As a consequence President Morsi and a rump parliament can rule for some indefinite period of time and cloak themselves in the legitimacy of electoral victory that seems so important to the Obama administration and its advisers.

There
remains another problem with the new constitution which I will touch on only
briefly in conclusion.It is not
clear that a solution to the current political crisis in the streets can be
found that will not provoke an equally profound constitutional crisis as long
as Morsi remains president.The
new constitution was written with several unspoken assumptions that I will also
not address at the moment.Under
the new constitution, however, if the president and the Lower House represent
very different political programs living together will be very difficult.Partly this is because the president
and the prime minister have distinct but interlocking responsibilities; partly
this is because it is more difficult to name a new prime minister in the
absence of a clear parliamentary majority but it is also extremely dangerous
for the president to dissolve a deadlocked parliament.Whether the current situation will lead
to such a conflict is unclear but those who think that there is an easy answer
to the political difficulties Egypt faces without Morsi’s resignation are
fooling themselves.